Cam'ron Began His Show With An Awesome Freestyle That Called Out Anthony Edwards And Buried Adidas For Taking Shots At Him In Their New Commercial

Joe Murphy. Getty Images.

So much in life is about timing. When you get the timing right and things align, anything is possible. When things may seem perfect but the timing doesn't quite match up, it's devastating.

In the world of marketing/advertising/narrative pushing, timing is everything. Striking while the iron's hot if you will. Nobody knows this phenomena more than Anthony Edwards, who exploded onto the scene not only this season, but really the last few months. Next MJ this, face of the NBA that, future of the NBA etc. Ant Man could do no wrong. He's charismatic, really really good at basketball, and the timing seemed perfect for his ascension as long as the Wolves kept winning.

Sadly, they did not keep winning. In fact, they were taken care of rather quickly in a 5 game gentlemen's sweep in the WCF, with Ant not exactly having a prime MJ level series. 

Their final game happened on 5/30 (some real bullshit btw. We should be prepping for a Game 7 today if the Wolves could have just handled their shit) and unfortunately for Ant, timing wasn't exactly on his side when it came to the latest Adidas ad

The ad itself? An awesome idea with just as good execution. From a marketing perspective, A+.

But the timing? Tough time to drop an ad like that immediately after the Wolves got demolished by 5,000 points on their home floor. I know Adidas couldn't control that, but it's a tough reality.

You may have noticed in that ad there was a receipt from Cam'ron talking about how he's an All Star and not a superstar yet. I dunno, is that all that crazy? The superstar debate is one of the silliest things we do when talking NBA players. Some say there are only like 3 superstars in the league, others call young unproven/unacommplished players like Ant superstars already, it's the perfect debate for the dead period of the NBA calendar in August.

As you saw, Ant didn't really like that comment, and because it's 2024, that meant it was time to get the response from Cam'ron, which he did in an awesome freestyle to open his show

Now if you're like me and grew up a rap/hip hop fan in the early 2000s, as soon as you heard this beat you probably started smiling. Black Rob's "Whoa!" was a classic

So to hear that beat again made me nostalgic as hell. Then you get to Cam'ron's freestyle over it and I wasn't sure if I was back in 2002 or what. I'm not sure younger stoolies may realize this, but at that time Cam'ron dropped heater after heater. His album Confessions Of Fire reached as high as #6 back in 1998, Come Home With Me reached #2 and went platinum in 2022, Killa season reached as high as #2 in 2006, Crime Pays as high as #3 in 2009 etc. If you're going to talk about that era, Cam'ron was one that dude.

So hearing him freestyling like that over the beat for Whoa! was not exactly how I thought my Monday was going to start, but I'm sure glad it was. In my opinion, THIS is how you handle weird manufactured online beef in 2024. If you can't drop a freestyle like this, just be quiet. It's basically the opposite of what we're currently seeing with Rasheed Wallace and Draymond Green who are beefing over a hypothetical basketball game

The reason why this clap back from Cam'ron was so good was while the Ant line will get most of the traction today I imagine, the best part of his entire rant in my opinion was him burying Adidas

YIKES. Tough look for Adidas there. How exactly do you recover from that? I mean, did all those players get hurt because of Adidas? I have no idea but I'm not sure it matters when you start talking about the narrative game. If Cam'ron says Adidas technology and products were responsible for all these players getting hurt, once that's out in the world there's nothing the company can say to change people's minds. What's the response even look like?

"Uhhh nuh uh! Those injuries had nothing to do with our shoes/cleats/etc!"

Good luck!

If you had told me 20+ years ago that I would one day live in a world where Cam'ron was making freestyles to begin a podcast where he clapped back at a future face of the NBA over a line in a commercial and then buried Adidas as a company, I'd be very, very confused. That would not have been on my bingo card back in 2002, but here we are. 

I know they say the podcast game is getting out of control to the point where everyone has one, but sometimes it gives us moments like this, so I'm going to chalk that up to a win. You give me anything that brings my brain back to 2002 and I'm all for it, so thank you Cam'ron.